Journalism

Newspaper Industry Death Watch

As leading newspapers continue to face falling revenues and profits, Merrill Goozner laments the loss of paying journalism jobs. "Advertising dollars are migrating away from print to the internet, broadcasting and other sources like direct mail," he writes. "Companies like Google and Yahoo are rolling in cash. But they hire very few journalists (if any). And those they do hire have very few standards. ... It is often said that our democracy cannot survive without a free press.

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Prisoner 345

"For the past five years," Sami al-Haj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera, "has been the only journalist known to be held in Guantánamo Bay," reports Rachel Morris. Al-Haj was originally detained in December 2001 while trying to cross the border into Afghanistan with a team of other journalists. After examining his case, Morris can find little evidence to justify his detention.

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Melanie Morgan Still Wants to Kill

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Terrorism Hype Backfires

The detention and subsequent charging of an Indian-born doctor, Mohamed Haneef, under draconian anti-terrorism laws has turned into a PR nightmare for the Australian government. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) charged Haneef with providing support to a terrorist organization, claiming that he had provided a mobile phone SIM card to a relative who had it with him when he recently crashed his car into Glasgow airport terminal. The AFP subsequently conceded that the SIM card was with another relative hundreds of kilometers away at the time of the airport attack.

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The Great Global Sceptic Swindle

Martin Durkin, the director of the global warming sceptic film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, concedes that a graph he used of temperatures over the last thousand years ignores data from the last twenty years. In Durkin's film the endpoint of the graph, produced by a British academic back in the 1980's, is labelled "now".

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Reporting from Margaritaville

Valarie D'EliaThe Atlantic City Convention & Visitors Authority recently held its first "fam," or familiarization tour, of the year, "wooing about 35 meeting and event planners, people in the tourism business, travel journalists and their guests." Included in the junket were "pina coladas and a lobster dinner overlooking Gardner's Basin ... and tickets to see Jimmy Buffett.

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Neo-cons Spinning Hearts and Minds

"As the George W. Bush administration struggles through its last two years in office, it appears that the agenda of neoconservative ideologues has finally lost its appeal among strategic parts of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus," writes Khody Akhavi.

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You Say Iraqi, I Say Al Qaeda

Glenn Greenwald and Joshua Micah Marshall are calling out the mainstream media for uncritically parroting the Bush administration's new strategy of referring to Iraqi insurgents as "Al Qaeda." Greenwald writes, "What is so amazing about this new rhetorical development — not only from our military, but also from our 'journalists' — is that, for years, it was too shameless and false even for the Bush administration to use.

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